Dan Martell - August 07, 2017


The 3 Phases of SaaS Sales

Topics
developing accounts
Hosted by
Dan Martell
How To Create a Great SaaS Lead Magnet The 5-10 Principles To Creating High Converting SaaS Lead Magnets

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

194.52

Word count

856

Sentence count

46


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I share with you how to avoid the frustration of hiring a sales person that isn't performing, or maybe you're doing 10-25k in your SaaS business and you want to scale it up, and you're thinking of hiring sales people or you re doing most of the sales yourself and you re like, when is the right time for me to bring somebody else on to this process to help me get more bandwidth?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.160 Rolls.
00:00:01.000 When I think of rolls, I think of 50 Cent's song like
00:00:03.880 riding around on my Escalade, riding on blades.
00:00:08.880 I don't know where I get that.
00:00:10.720 Oh, I want to hear that song now.
00:00:12.940 Have you ever, yeah, I'm gonna go play it.
00:00:22.820 The three activities of a SaaS sales process.
00:00:26.660 In today's video, I'm gonna share with you how to avoid
00:00:28.800 the frustration of hiring a salesperson
00:00:31.900 that isn't performing or maybe you're doing
00:00:34.040 10 to 25,000 and MRR in your SaaS business
00:00:37.380 and you want to scale it up so you're thinking
00:00:39.040 of hiring salespeople or you're doing
00:00:41.220 most of the sales yourself and you're like,
00:00:42.820 when is the right time for me to bring somebody else on
00:00:45.760 to this process to help me get more bandwidth?
00:00:48.480 You know, I've been fortunate enough to coach
00:00:50.420 and help scale many of my clients' SaaS businesses.
00:00:53.360 I've done it for my own companies
00:00:55.060 and there's definitely three specific areas
00:00:58.020 that you need to get right to do this in an efficient way
00:01:00.520 or you end up spending a lot of money.
00:01:01.920 I mean, at the end of the day, people is probably
00:01:03.920 the most expensive line item on your balance sheet
00:01:06.920 and understanding how to get them productive
00:01:08.860 and executing and get you new customers
00:01:10.300 is gonna be the number one key to making this all work.
00:01:13.200 So the first activity is sourcing.
00:01:15.580 How do you build a process that,
00:01:18.400 in a repeatable, predictable way, gets you new leads,
00:01:21.780 new marketing leads, new qualified leads.
00:01:23.940 Some people call these MQLs, marketing qualified leads.
00:01:26.980 Some companies call this their SDRs,
00:01:29.820 your sales development reps.
00:01:30.880 But sometimes it's outbound calls or it's inbound processing
00:01:34.480 from leads that come through your website.
00:01:36.220 But it's the demand gen activity.
00:01:38.700 So I call that sourcing.
00:01:39.900 So there's a whole bucket of just sourcing activities
00:01:42.960 that need to go on to make sure that you get qualified leads
00:01:47.160 to kick off to the second activity in the process
00:01:50.400 which is closing, right?
00:01:52.500 So number two is closing.
00:01:53.480 If you've got a sales flow in your business
00:01:57.080 then you've got closers.
00:01:57.960 You've got people that are able to do demos
00:02:00.220 to discover the customer's needs,
00:02:01.920 to deliver solutions to those needs,
00:02:03.760 to ask for the sale.
00:02:06.120 Many entrepreneurs are doing this process themselves
00:02:08.960 and they don't have somebody sourcing.
00:02:10.500 And this is where I think there's a real opportunity
00:02:12.660 for you to bring that person in.
00:02:14.140 At the end of the video, I'm gonna share with you
00:02:16.000 how to consider the right timing
00:02:18.380 for bringing somebody in to augment that specific activity.
00:02:21.600 So in the closing steps, some people call them sales execs,
00:02:24.840 account execs, salespeople.
00:02:27.040 Some people are tricky and they call them
00:02:28.840 customer something people but literally they're,
00:02:32.440 you know, if they manage a quota,
00:02:33.880 if they're quota carrying people,
00:02:35.180 then they're salespeople and it's all about
00:02:37.340 the closing activity.
00:02:38.680 The third big bucket is about developing.
00:02:41.980 You know, I think this is a huge opportunity,
00:02:43.480 especially if you start to get on year two of your product,
00:02:46.700 you get close to year three.
00:02:48.500 You have customers, they've experienced value
00:02:51.560 And this is your opportunity to really develop the account,
00:02:54.360 right, or create new, what's called expansion revenue
00:02:57.600 for your SaaS business.
00:02:59.000 So this can be done through a function or role
00:03:01.300 called customer success.
00:03:03.340 But they're also accountable for growing the account.
00:03:06.400 That's why I call it a developing role.
00:03:07.980 So those three play into each other.
00:03:10.580 One is sourcing, two is closing, and three is developing.
00:03:13.780 Now, here's the tip.
00:03:15.680 If you want to understand when's the right time
00:03:17.460 to bring somebody in, it's whenever the person's
00:03:20.720 primary role is taken over by 20% activities that is the other
00:03:25.020 step.
00:03:25.760 So if I'm just doing sales and I notice that 20% of my time is
00:03:30.960 qualifying and sourcing leads, then that's a great opportunity
00:03:34.240 for the founder to say, you know what, maybe it's time we hire
00:03:36.200 somebody to take over that part.
00:03:38.000 Or if you're a sales person and you're also doing a lot of
00:03:40.540 customer success and expanding and kind of renewals are coming
00:03:43.900 up and you're trying to kind of expand and grow that account,
00:03:46.480 the developing activity, then maybe it's time to hire somebody
00:03:49.880 to just lead and manage customer success in your business.
00:03:52.840 But it's the 20% rule applied to each different activity.
00:03:57.280 That's what I have for you.
00:03:58.380 So if you want to grow your business,
00:03:59.480 make sure you focus on sourcing, closing,
00:04:01.560 and developing your accounts.
00:04:03.060 As per usual, I want to challenge you
00:04:04.400 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
00:04:06.300 and I'll see you next week.
00:04:07.760 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:04:10.440 to get other tips and strategies
00:04:11.560 on how to start and grow your business.
00:04:13.100 I'd also encourage you to join my newsletter
00:04:14.900 where I share exclusive invites,
00:04:16.600 free entrepreneurial training, and other community contests.
00:04:19.100 and if you want to keep going I've got two other videos queued up ready for you to go.
00:04:22.940 I'll see you next week.